It Wasn’t Just Oil Companies Spreading Climate Denial
The MIT professor was unequivocal.
“If we had to stop producing CO₂, no coal, oil, or gas could be burned,” Carroll Wilson declared. The world would have to adopt nuclear energy en masse and perhaps even turn to “electric motor vehicles.”
It was June 9, 1971. Wilson, a management professor, wasn’t speaking at an environmental rally or a scientific meeting. He was talking to a room full of engineers and businessmen who had gathered in Cleveland, Ohio, for the electricity industry’s annual conference.
His speech was as up-to-date a discussion of climate science as you could find in the early 1970s. Although he said that global warming wasn’t yet a scientific certainty—which was true in those days—he was clear that it needed to be taken seriously. And the conference’s organizer, the Edison Electric Institute, seemed keen to get the best climate research in front of its members, even if it had radical implications for their business.
Yet scarcely two decades later, virtually the entire electric-utility industry—including the Edison Electric Institute, its flagship lobbying group, and the Electric Power Research said that global warming would not portend disaster, but bring “cooler days, warmer nights, and better vegetables.”
